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Lot Essay
“I met her today at an exhibition,” Anaïs Nin wrote in her diary of Rahon on the day, in May 1945, that the artist’s solo exhibition opened at Peggy Guggenheim’s gallery, Art of This Century, in New York. “She is striking in appearance. Tall, dark-haired, sunburned, she looks like a Mexican-Indian woman. But she was born in France.” Rahon had arrived in Mexico in 1939, at the invitation of Frida Kahlo and Diego Rivera, with her husband, the artist Wolfgang Paalen, and the Swiss photographer Eva Sulzer. A protégé of André Breton, who published her first book of poetry, A même la terre (1936), Rahon had earlier circulated among the Parisian avant-garde, posing for Man Ray, designing with Elsa Schiaparelli, and entering into a memorable affair with Pablo Picasso. She turned to painting around the time of her emigration to Mexico, channeling the chromatic abstraction of her poetry onto canvases that embraced the land and its prehistoric past. “Her paintings are completely drawn from subterranean worlds, while her descriptions of Mexico are violent with color, drama, and joy,” Nin concluded of Rahon, who would become a close friend (The Diary of Anaïs Nin, vol. 4, 1944-1947, New York, 1971, p. 58).
“In earliest times painting was magical,” Rahon once wrote. “It was the key to the invisible. In those days the value of a work lay in its powers of conjuration, a power that talent alone could not achieve. Like the shaman, the sybil and the wizard, the painter had to make himself humble, so that he could share in the manifestation of spirits and forms.” Like her Surrealist friends and fellow émigrés Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, Rahon believed in the preternatural power of painting. She rooted this alchemical metaphor in the elemental world—“I use a lot of elements of nature that push like the wind, tragic things in the life of nature”—and evoked its ritual magic in her poetry as well as in a number of painterly, prismatic landscapes, among them the present Untitled (in N. Deffebach, “Alice Rahon: Poems of Light and Shadow, Painting in Free Verse,” Onthebus, no. 8-9, 1991, p. 180 and 186).
Although the craggy coast and prehistoric standing stones of Brittany, where she summered as a child, remained an enduring reference, Rahon embraced the new and ancient enchantments that she found in Mexico, and her paintings responded instinctively to the local topography. “Now she appears with large, ruddy abstractions of the Southwestern landscape,” noted a contemporary review. “Mountains, muffled in contour, are seen through heavy multicolor mists or sand storms. Their scale is indicated by sharp, small accents—sometimes in the manner of Mexican blankets—of moons, suns, teepees and grazing cattle” (“Alice Rahon,” ARTnews 47, no. 8, 1949, p. 47). The extended horizontality of Untitled—a characteristic format seen also, for example, in Feu d’herbes (1945) and Happy Hunting Grounds (1946)—underscores the staggering immensity of her landscapes, here illuminated in a fiery incandescence, awash in red and yellow ochre. A burning sun and crescent moon hang above the vermilion-tipped peaks that rise in the foreground, marking time and space within the vastness of the Mexican altiplano. “I was always fascinated by the idea of painting the air,” Rahon acknowledged, and here the aether—shimmering and sulfuric—finally becomes her subject, coalescing earth and sky into textures of pure, radiant color (in R. Bonet, “Alice Rahon,” Art Nexus 8, no. 75, December-February 2010, p. 120).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park
“In earliest times painting was magical,” Rahon once wrote. “It was the key to the invisible. In those days the value of a work lay in its powers of conjuration, a power that talent alone could not achieve. Like the shaman, the sybil and the wizard, the painter had to make himself humble, so that he could share in the manifestation of spirits and forms.” Like her Surrealist friends and fellow émigrés Leonora Carrington and Remedios Varo, Rahon believed in the preternatural power of painting. She rooted this alchemical metaphor in the elemental world—“I use a lot of elements of nature that push like the wind, tragic things in the life of nature”—and evoked its ritual magic in her poetry as well as in a number of painterly, prismatic landscapes, among them the present Untitled (in N. Deffebach, “Alice Rahon: Poems of Light and Shadow, Painting in Free Verse,” Onthebus, no. 8-9, 1991, p. 180 and 186).
Although the craggy coast and prehistoric standing stones of Brittany, where she summered as a child, remained an enduring reference, Rahon embraced the new and ancient enchantments that she found in Mexico, and her paintings responded instinctively to the local topography. “Now she appears with large, ruddy abstractions of the Southwestern landscape,” noted a contemporary review. “Mountains, muffled in contour, are seen through heavy multicolor mists or sand storms. Their scale is indicated by sharp, small accents—sometimes in the manner of Mexican blankets—of moons, suns, teepees and grazing cattle” (“Alice Rahon,” ARTnews 47, no. 8, 1949, p. 47). The extended horizontality of Untitled—a characteristic format seen also, for example, in Feu d’herbes (1945) and Happy Hunting Grounds (1946)—underscores the staggering immensity of her landscapes, here illuminated in a fiery incandescence, awash in red and yellow ochre. A burning sun and crescent moon hang above the vermilion-tipped peaks that rise in the foreground, marking time and space within the vastness of the Mexican altiplano. “I was always fascinated by the idea of painting the air,” Rahon acknowledged, and here the aether—shimmering and sulfuric—finally becomes her subject, coalescing earth and sky into textures of pure, radiant color (in R. Bonet, “Alice Rahon,” Art Nexus 8, no. 75, December-February 2010, p. 120).
Abby McEwen, Assistant Professor, University of Maryland, College Park